by Tim Myers
…no Oxford nor Eton…
—Henry James
When I woke up this morning, the first thing I thought of was that terrible night—how we’d sat with Zane in the basement of his parents’ house, trying to act like the adults we so clearly were not—beating around the bush till Chang came right out and said it was an intervention, we thought he was screwing up royal, he was an alcoholic and he had to admit it. Zane just looked at us, with a chilling smile that said You too, as if we were just like his parents, all our parents—and I wished he’d raged and cursed or tried to swing at us or something. He didn’t. It would have been better if he had; maybe that kind of rage could have saved him, just like we thought it could save our world.
It was a beautiful life; I’ll never deny that. My childhood on Eos was peaceful, comfortable, sensual, and happy—the sunny climate, our white-and-green-tiled house on its quiet street in the forest, our little school with its cheerful teachers, family trips to the city center. But as we entered adolescence, Zane and I and our friends, we found ourselves more and more convinced that something was wrong with the world, our world, the only world we knew–fundamentally wrong. And we began aching to tear the cover off and expose the rot.
Not that we really understood what was rotten.
I found myself thinking about Zane again during the great Presentation Ceremony today, with the crowds filling the plaza and the International President singing the praises of my staff, my program, the university–and me. Zane would have laughed his ass off at that, at any of us having become so respectable. It’s pretty funny, actually.
Back then Eos was a still an isolated, newly-settled world, and we were its third generation; our grandparents were “colonists” and many of our parents “natives,” the first true Eosians. Eos was “untouched,” as the phrase went. After FITPRO–the Fifth Terran Probe Search–turned up bio-potential in the thirteenth system of the Near-Canis-Major Sector, it was only a matter of time before one of those planets had been scanned, mapped, explored, and approved for settlement. Here was breathable air, liquid water, an equable climate, basic geological stability, and even a familiar single sun. The planet’s many small oceans regulated temperatures; there were four seasons, none severely different from the others. Crops grew with beguiling ease. Both land and sea were fairly rich in flora and fauna, but nothing particularly dangerous–no huge food-chains with monstrous predators at their apices. Eos (as it was named by a Terran political committee) was a gentle world; it attracted a certain kind of person. And we were their children.
I don’t mean to belittle the risks our grandparents took, nor the great upheaval in their lives; I don’t know if my generation can even imagine how it all must have felt. But the trip itself was fairly uneventful, most of the work in the hands of the expert pilots, navigators, and high-main techs. And once the initial flurry of building and social organizing was finished—the broad outlines having been planned back on Terra–life settled rather quickly into its characteristically pleasant Eosian pattern.
When we were kids, the population was only about two million (birth control was free and universally accessible), all of which was concentrated in the mildest zones on either side of the equator. There were seven large cities, many smaller ones, and numerous farmlands. But even the capital had no more than 60,000 inhabitants. And “traveling” meant going from one city to another–1500 miles apart at the farthest–or to farms to visit relatives. No one went anywhere else–and this on a planet nearly the size of Terra.
Life on Eos, as I’ve said, was largely an unthinking happiness. It wasn’t paradise, of course. I now know there was some dark shit going on even then, in secret—that’s just human, I suppose. But there wasn’t much of it. A murder was huge news, gripped the headlines for months. And even the inevitable disagreements of daily life rarely escalated into serious conflict, especially since everyone spoke English and, whatever their original nationality, had more or less blended long ago during the centuries of globalization back on Terra. Perhaps because of the beauty and ease of the planet, perhaps because of the kind of person who was drawn to it, there was no war and little violence. I remember–from when I was about ten–the time Kemball Su and Aaron Hestings argued over Kemball’s purchase of Hestings’ store, which Hestings had reneged on. Then the store burned down. Kemball had nothing to do with it; everybody knew that, and the Fire Department people found faulty wiring. But he felt so bad that he left his job for a year and went to work with Hestings (not “for” him, of course; there was none of that). Nobody thought it was a strange thing to do–it was a “nice gesture,” they said. Wasn’t considered heroic either. And it wasn’t much of a sacrifice on Kemball’s part anyway, since life was just as good working with Hestings as it had been on his own–maybe even a little friendlier. That was how things tended to go on Eos.
As we entered middle school and then high school, that kind of cheeriness began to bug us more and more. You couldn’t escape it. The architecture, for example: Everywhere you turned there was white, too damn much white for our taste: white pillared colonnades; low off-white stucco ranch-style houses; swimming pools tiled in white and pale blue; screened sleeping porches; sunken living rooms–and of course no building on the entire planet higher than five stories.
And there was little contact with Terra. To us, the “home-planet” was like a vague rumor, a rich but distant uncle we’d never met. Oh, the technology was there–but few paid attention to the uplink system. We had schools, of course, we had culture and art, people read books and magazines and went to Eosian movies; but the government never really pushed education, I suppose simply because after a certain point it seemed irrelevant. Every Eosian graduated from an extended high-school “setting,” and every workplace had its own “Lifelong Learning” program, with time off daily for reading and music, and company-sponsored cultural field trips. Education was universally valued—but it actually only went so far.
This was the world we began to hate, Zane and me and the other guys. We hated its complacency, its squeaky-clean conformity, its seeming conspiracy to numb the passion of the human heart. I see now that it was impossible to separate our wisdom from the foolishness of youth–our boredom, for example, half of which derived from our own ignorance and moodiness, the other half a desperate crying of confined spirits. We began to meet and talk about these things, first in our bedrooms at home (in true Eosian spirit, our parents always gave us privacy) and then in a series of shelters we built in the woods. We saw ourselves as rebels, began mocking all the “goodness” around us, the very fiber of our parents’ calm and careful world. And as we got older, our defiance became more specific.
But that was tough to pull off on Eos. It wasn’t that we were pressured or punished or controlled; it was much subtler, and, as far as I can tell, mostly unconscious in the people around us, including our parents. We just couldn’t ruffle them; their tolerance knew no bounds. They’d wink at each other knowingly, which infuriated us–since we knew it meant Stay loose–they’ll outgrow this–the most maddening thing they could have done. Because we were adolescents, yes–but in a more serious way too: because it worked to distance us from our instincts, and we sensed that, and felt an even more desperate anger. If no one really takes you seriously, you just can’t grow.
Adults, we told each other, were too comfortable or stupid to understand. There was one teacher we had, a guy we liked, who used to let us rant when we’d talk to him after school–but even he couldn’t agree with us, which he admitted with honesty and sympathy. “Hey, guys,” he’d say, “even if some of your accusations are true, you’re missing the point. It’s the same anywhere: Be thankful for the good stuff and learn how to put up with the crap. That’s what home is. And having a home–that’s a very good thing.”
But we weren’t buying it.
We loved to mockingly salute the Eosian “Irrepublic,” as we called it, in the belief that it was obviously “irrelevant”–even “irresponsible.” What we couldn’t see was just how right we were, and how wrong.
Most of our peers detested us, of course. To them we were perbs and losers, and worse yet, willful losers; they couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to be so contrary. To us they were sheep, living in saccharine fantasies, bound to be children all their lives. They saw their own unspoken fears in us–and we saw ours in them.
So we ended up having to enjoy our rebelliousness by ourselves, impressing only each other. And even that didn’t always work.
One of our most daring early attempts failed miserably. Zane and Ed Junior and Chang and Bobby snuck out one night (I was at my grandparents’; Dex and Woo-gun were working at some summer camp), got to the city center before dawn, then wrote FREE KNOWLEDGE in huge black letters on the front door of the International Presidential Residence (there were no fences or security people–no need). Then they hid behind the low walls of the Founders Museum (a small building in pastels, with stiff little well-lit dioramas of the Journey and the Settling, and lots of statistics about “lifestyle”). They were expecting a big hubbub, enraged citizenry. But an early-morning milk-delivery woman came along, spotted the graffiti, and instantly ran to a just-opened hardware store–ran, I’m telling you; the guys swore it–and bought stuff with her own money to paint over our revolutionary slogan. The kicker was that she thought it so interesting she took a picture first, and ended up giving it to the TV station, and they broadcast it all over Eos–but nobody even blinked. We meant “FREE” as a verb, as in “liberate knowledge”; they took it as an adjective–and since no one had to pay for school or libraries or sat-links, our ideological declaration was dismissed as childish nonsense, even laughed at. We felt like shit.
But we found other ways. Zane was usually the leader. During our junior year he somehow managed to get involved with the staff at the News Building in the capital, an institution concentrating almost completely on local non-news (endless talk about sewage projects, budget predictions, citizenship awards, now and then a car wreck or minor environmental scare) but with uplinks to the one satellite still in contact with Terra. That will sound insane to any Terran reader–relying on a single satellite. But that’s how it was; people accepted it.
What Zane did was actually land a job in the TV department, where the spacelink scanner was; he tried to con old Mr. Garcia into thinking the facility needed light maintenance and “security.” Amazingly, Garcia bought it–and soon Zane was staying up most nights tapping into Terran transmissions, including TV, then downloading stuff from Terra, cramming it onto all kinds of different infoclips. Then he’d teach us–he taught us everything. I don’t know when he slept.
A few years ago I ran into Mr. Garcia, out in Comville–a very elderly man now. We sat on his porch and laughed about the old days. “You know,” he said, “I knew Zane was at the scanner all night–he had to log in, for one thing. But I figured it was good for him. Help him get it out of his system. I heard about his…his death. Maybe it wasn’t so good.” He gave me a sorrowful look.
So ignorance is bliss?, I wanted to say–but what was the point? “No, Mr. Garcia,” I told him firmly. “It was very good for him.”
We got a lot of juice out of that scanner–studied everything that came over it, considering the whole process as a schooling in revolution. So we knocked ourselves out.
The history of Terra and its trans-system colonies was odd to us, and we didn’t make much headway there. And Terran art and literature, though they often moved us deeply, were just as often incomprehensible (in our world, “art” meant pictures to hang in the living room, and “literature” didn’t amount to much more than soap operas, in print or video form). There were much darker things too. The first time we saw one of those arena talk-shows, with its prattling Ringmaster and all the sick sex and the fighting, I went into Zane’s parents’ bathroom and threw up, careful so the guys wouldn’t hear me. The wars and the street violence were far worse; we were astounded to learn that in a place called “Middle East,” war had been going on almost continually for eight hundred years. Much of Terran life made us deeply uneasy–but we were too young and stubborn to let that deflect our purpose, so we told ourselves it was “reality,” we could handle it, you had to look it in the eye. Secretly I hated a lot of it.
But we ate up the social science, the science, the technology, the political theory, and in the name of rebellion actually gave ourselves excellent foundations in education. We were attracted to less elevated material too, of course. “Sucks,” for example; we loved the word. To us, everything on Eos “sucked”–and we knew the sexual metaphor behind the phrase, tried to throw it into people’s faces. But they just looked at us and smiled; oral sex–what’s the big deal? Most Eosians became sexually active around 13 or 14; we insisted on maintaining an angry celibacy (which I now see as cutting off our noses to spite our faces, if you get my meaning; like I say, life on Eos was good).
And Terran rock and roll!–that translated just fine. For a time we were in danger of losing our revolutionary fervor to our new-found passion for rock. We’d never heard anything like it. But we worked out a way to see it as a “revolutionary activity” and just kept on with it. We loved Pagan Anguish and Bad Spiral, as much for their hyper-speed jazz rhythms as anything else, and we couldn’t get enough Dynamite Squid. Ricky was a Trance Q freak; he listened to “Poseidon’s Nuclear Fret-Groove” so often he knew every note by heart. We played Mike Brick and the Doggish Cats just for the pure rock feel of it, and Dark Fungus too. Zane loved the Slot-Slammers, but they were a bit too much for the rest of us; we didn’t realize how Eosian we really were.
And that was how Zane launched our “revolution.”
Eosian music in those days, though it came in varied forms, was characterized by a general “pleasantness”–a quality I no longer automatically disdain but abhorred as a teenager. To us it was wrong in every way–aesthetically, socially, politically, metaphysically–though our expressions of these opinions consisted more of obscenities than of critical analysis. Our people had brought a great deal from Terra when they came, of course–though some things had more or less consciously been left behind, including the more extreme versions of rock then popular. And even highly energetic musical forms had softened over three generations of cozy Eosian living.
One day, out in the woods, we had Dark Fungus on the player and started to dance–after knocking back as much of the gentle local liquor as our stomachs could hold. It got pretty crazy, as it usually did–and of course we masturbated, just to show an oblivious world exactly what we thought of their goody-two-shoes “sexual hygiene” and conformist couples-sex. But suddenly Zane hit the stop button and raised his arms triumphantly, announcing to the sound of chirping birds in the suddenly quiet forest, Gentlemen, we have been given the Weapon. And it is Rock.
We were blown away, couldn’t resist such self-conscious drama. Under his influence, we actually came to believe that all Eos needed was rock and roll.
So we rigged up a huge sound system, stealing parts and know-how, and set it up behind the scenes at the outdoor Debutante Ball down in Shirley Square. Just as the first waltz was starting, we cranked it up: slamming drums, wailing guitars, a digi-mix saxophone, some woman screaming in a language we couldn’t understand. But nothing really happened. Oh, everybody in the crowd put their hands over their ears, and looked around in confusion; but someone quickly found the system and turned it off, and the ball went on. We’d thought the police would come scrambling–but we weren’t even detained. (What were we thinking? The “police” in the neighborhoods were our own parents, who took turns walking through certain areas saying hi to everybody and stopping for coffee; even the city cops spent most of their time checking parking meters and visiting schools for safety demonstrations). My parents later told me they were “disappointed.” Some revolution.
We had no idea that the real Revolution was just beginning.
To a Terran reader, the next events will come as no surprise. To us, though, they were astonishing, befuddling, even threatening. You have to remember that a certain kind of person emigrated from Terra to Eos, a place where you could basically turn a whole world into a gated community. They were idealists, I now realize, but not too idealistic: They wanted a better world–but they liked good food and good TV too. They were the kind of men and women who people reform movements, but never lead them–and no one can see this more clearly than such people’s children, especially as teenagers.
And remember, we were still relatively new to the planet. The first archaeological discoveries came when Zane and I were eighteen; at that point humans had only inhabited Eos for about 60 years. Our colonist-grandparents had been far too busy setting up a civilization to launch expensive scientific searches. And soon Eosian culture had taken on the self-contented ease that made such ambitious and possibly fruitless work seem less and less attractive. Besides, Eos was uninhabited.
In fact, it took Terrans to bring the deeper truth to light. We sure as hell weren’t looking for that kind of thing. Our university was, by Terran standards, almost a joke–more of a social club than an institution of learning. All its courses focused on practical career preparation, and only for Eos. There weren’t even uplinks in the university library.
But Terran scientists and scholars hadn’t forgotten the “Eos Experiment,” as they called it (it had long since stopped being an “experiment” to us). They hadn’t forgotten; they just hadn’t been able to get funding. Significant amounts were required, to say the least. When they showed up on our world–three large groups of them, each in its own interstellar tach-transport–they immediately set up “studies,” a word which, in that particular sense, had almost disappeared from Eos. The whole thing was on the news, of course. But we didn’t pay much attention at first; most Eosians really weren’t sure what it meant. Even we rebels didn’t pay it any mind, though you’d think we might have hailed it as the thin end of the revolutionary wedge. We just didn’t understand. Besides, at that point we had our own problems.
Part of our rebellion had been “liberating” prodigious amounts of the local liquor, made from spennim vines, and drinking on our own, drinking to excess–since mere social drinking was quite a conformist thing to do, accepted by everyone. We went at it hard–as with everything else we did, half out of adolescent confusion and half out of a dark hunger we could never name. And it got old, as such things will. But not before Zane was hooked. He was always the one who felt things most, whose passions were strongest. That was why we followed him; maybe that was why he was now following this terrible new road. We kept calling after him, but he wouldn’t–or couldn’t–turn back.
And that’s when it began to make more sense to me–what was actually wrong with Eos, I mean. Watching my friend slowly kill himself before he even got out of his teens–watching him brutally and painfully tear himself from those who loved him–and trying to explain to everyone, his parents, our teachers, the authorities, exactly what he was doing and why–all of this slowly revealed to me exactly where the deep invisible wound lay in Eosian life. At the time I couldn’t articulate this, only sensed it. But no one would listen anyway, not really. They’d smile, say it was a phase, say he’d find a way out, say almost anything–and they’d look at him, even my parents, as he sat there haggard and pale and bloated, and they wouldn’t see. He needed more rest, they’d tell him, or they’d claim that’s what came of keeping the girls at arm’s length. Even his mom and dad, despite the fear I could see in their eyes, insisted it would turn out all right.
He was committing suicide–and they didn’t want to know. It didn’t fit with how things were, a dark cloud in an otherwise sunny sky. So they just looked away.
Until he died, that is–then his parents were so shattered they could barely function. Zane died in a wreck, drunk on his ass; it was only a quicker way of doing what he was already attempting gradually. He hit a big tree so hard he tore it down; the car was completely destroyed. I remember standing there with his mom and dad, on the forest highway in the light of the Security van; they were looking down at him with their mouths open, like clubbed fish. From that moment they were tortured day and night by questions they didn’t even know how to ask. I think they still are.
Afterwards, especially with all the media coverage, their neighbors quietly began avoiding them. Eosians lived very healthy lives, and our colonist-grandparents were only in their nineties or so; people didn’t like being reminded of death in a place where it was still relatively rare.
But at least Zane was there with me–at least we were together–when the announcement came. The Terran teams, we now know, were doing an entire planetary analysis–geology, oceanography, biology, chemistry, atmospheric studies, the works. And they’d called in other experts over their telespace links to consult on certain findings they’d made. One day when Zane and I were sitting aimlessly by the Founders’ Fountain in the main plaza in the capital, the news broke; we saw it on the public TV outside Mkembo’s.
What no Eosian had ever really considered was that a people could inhabit a planet–then die out–and be so long dead that every obvious sign of their civilization had eroded away. Over innumerable millions of years, the geologically-active planet we called “Eos” had reformed its surface again and again, like an eternal cat endlessly cleaning itself with its tongue. But it still held, in subtler and deeper form, the memory of its ancient race.
Their works were gone forever–but across our continent, and on others, the Terran scientists had found what they called “significant concentrations.” What would have remained utterly invisible to the Eosian population spoke volumes to the Terrans–not only because they knew what to look for, but also simply because they were looking.
Where an ancient highway once crossed a plain, they found–eons later–a concentration of artificially situated gravels and the chemical components of what had once been a form of asphalt. Where a building had stood, or a town, or a great city, the earth still held a wild variety of assembled chemicals and material remnants. Roads, houses, farms, docks, streets, travelports, transport lines, great urban conglomerates–as the reports poured in, we began to realize that Eos had not only been peopled, but mightily so.
The traces of the largest and most complex architectural and civic structures have been dated to roughly a million years ago. And of course they’ve been found in the most geologically stable areas, mid-continental plains, that kind of thing; very little turned up near current or past subduction zones, as expected. The materials were what you might predict: lower layers showing heavy concentrations of various types of stone (much mica, feldspar and quartz, for example, leading some experts to talk of “early granite cities”)–later concentrations of iron and a kind of concrete–then steel and various plastics–even something analogous to tecta, the main building material on Terra these last thousand years.
Reports from the forests of the polar regions taught us that even lovely Eos had once borne a curse we’d only heard about from Terra: acid rain. And that was just one of the many quirks in the natural systems indicating the prolonged presence of thinking beings. Further genetic and bio-structural studies suggested, among other things, that a number of our plant and animal species had been, at one time, domesticated, even genetically manipulated.
But this all came later; on that first day, as we stood in the summer air of the plaza with our mouths hanging open, the report was much simpler. “There’s no question about it,” a bearded professor-type was saying on the TV, in his heavily-accented Terran English. “This planet was previously inhabited during remote antiquity.”
We just looked at each other. Alone there in the warm sunlight–which made Zane’s worn and brooding features look even worse–we slowly began to understand. This was what we’d prayed for, though we hadn’t realized it until that very moment. Suddenly we were dancing for joy.
Our joy was somewhat gothic; the previous Eosians (or whatever they called themselves) didn’t just vanish. War or plague or violent ecological upheaval or some space-born disaster killed them off; the scientists were fairly certain about that. This, of course, tickled our well-developed sense of dark theater. But even as we began to imagine, we suddenly saw how serious the game we’d been playing really was. There was something deep here, something beneath this shallow Eosian ever-summer with its chittering birds, fragrant neighborhood-forests, and contented farmers and city folk. We’d finally come into the depth we’d longed for all our young lives. And this was when I first began to realize that archaeology was the “revolution” I myself had been seeking–a truly radical way of living and seeing, a hunkering down close to the roots of things, a digging in the dark. Zane must have felt something like that too; as we jumped around the plaza shouting with delight, I saw the light come back into his eyes. But that was the last time I saw it.
It was funny, though, too–because we Eosians didn’t really understand the spokesman’s whole message. “Previously inhabited” was perfectly clear, of course. But very few of us knew the word “antiquity.” It was only when I was on Terra working for my doctorate that I learned about “antiques” and, by extension, “antiquity,” that sense of history stretching over centuries, millennia. But I laughed when I first saw an “antique store”; there was no such thing on Eos.
Zane was too far gone, though. He died nine months later, just as the second wave of expeditionary ships from Terra was arriving. To him the revolution really was a matter of life and death. For a long time I was deeply angry at him for letting himself die, especially so stupidly. I guess I understand a little more now.
With the arrival of the new ships, things really began to change. Not only from the great influx of Terrans (since this was huge news back there too, and they began an enormous program of exploration and analysis)–but because of what then happened to us as a people.
It wasn’t like everyone suddenly stopped being Eosian. For one thing, the Terrans weren’t like us; that was instantly clear. I’d thought of them as heroes for so long that the truth was tough to swallow. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them, it wasn’t that they didn’t stimulate me, open a whole new life before my yearning eyes–but they just weren’t us. They’d often “raise their eyebrows” at Eosian ways; those who were honest would point out that, to them, we sometimes seemed simplistic, over-cheerful, clannish. For the first time in my life I realized I really was Eosian, and I began to see just what that meant. It humbled me, but it was wonderful, too, though I had to learn to trust it. I actually began to feel “at home”–a brand-new feeling for me. I fell in love just then, too, and we got married and started a family–so that was also a factor.
The Terrans are generally a harsher people than we are, more direct and “down-to-business,” more driven and rushed and far drier in their wit and their assessments of others. The first time I ever heard the phrase “Time is money” was from the lips of a Terran paleobotanist. As I began to see our Eosian uniqueness and slowly come to love it, to see myself as ineluctably a part of it, it dawned on me how innocent our adolescent “rebellion” had really been. It’d never even crossed our minds, for example, to actually shoot somebody or blow something up—time-honored traditions, we now know, among “freedom fighters.” In classic Eosian style, we’d pulled all our punches.
Except Zane, of course. Not that he’d ever hurt anyone directly. But in some ways he was the only one motivated enough—and brave enough–to really commit to “revolution”–and he paid for that commitment like a solider.
Under Terran influence, though, most Eosians began trying to haul themselves into the present–a real present, a tempestuous present, marked by doubt and mystery and the need for hard thinking. We’ve also had to face new problems. We’re not as close to each other, for example, as we were before; some Eosians are loudly criticizing the changes, already imposing on the recent past a golden glow of mythic proportions. But most seem to welcome the fresh air.
And another of the challenges brought by the great Change seems particularly significant, at least to me. There are a lot more bars and gin joints on Eos now, selling more than just spennim brew, and they’re crowded, and people are buying more liquor in stores too. Police reports reveal some serious drugs being smuggled in too, though at this point only in small amounts. But this wasn’t one of the gradual changes, like the slight rise in our crime rate; it happened almost immediately after the news from the archaeologists got out. It was as if most people knew, or had some sense of, the deeper truths, were just holding something in, keeping something animalistic pushed down in the darkness–or maybe even, like little kids, holding their breath for fear of spoiling a pretty dream. We don’t feel quite so “special” as Eosians now. And it turns out that plenty of people were “letting go” in private; one of the new TV stations recently did a week-long series on secret alcoholism before the Change–a lot of people, and even their doctors, were keeping the lid on that one.
On a brighter note, our university now has seventeen branches across the planet, with many more planned; the main campus and four of the branches boast doctoral programs. Telespace links to Terra are now everywhere and in constant use; our culture, our economy, our political life, all are under examination. It’s not like we’re committed to sweeping changes; we’re Eosian, after all, and we like a lot of what we have. But education has been invigorated and expanded–and that always brings some kind of serious change, just as night follows day.
I was among the early graduating classes on the main campus (now grown to 15,000 students) and so were Bobby, Chang and Woo-gun; I saw my old fellow-rebels’ faces, heavier now and middle-aged, at the front of the crowd during the Presentation today. Of course we can’t hold a candle to the Terran experts in what they still call, with unconscious haughtiness, “off-planet archaeology”–but we’re gaining. And in archaeology there’s something to be said for the instincts of the well-trained local.
The great Change came twelve years ago. Today I stood before cameras and t-space-cams to announce the discovery of something we’ve sought fiercely ever since then. Lifting its adam-glass container over my head, I revealed it to the worlds: a slender yellowish object, rounded at one end and torn jaggedly at the other, about two feet long, the only one we’ve found so far. A “bone”–though that term, of course, is only an analogy to human anatomy. The crowd roared.
We know that it belonged to a bi-pedal species–that it can be stratigraphically associated with the remains of ancient artificial structures–and exhaustive research has shown it doesn’t belong to any of Eos’s living animal species or those of the fossil record we’ve so far been able to catalogue. It was found in a “deep-well” dig down on one of the southern islands, formerly a population center–the first tangible sign we’ve had of “them.”
I know very little about it, even though I found it myself, at a barren cliffside site one afternoon in the heat of the southern summer. But I know they were here. I know they lived. Part of me is deeply afraid of what we may find out about them; part is exhilarated beyond words.
I know, too, that without this to look for, my own life would have remained desperately impoverished–and I know that the Eosian dream probably would have gone sour too, eventually, in the absence of such questions, such fears, such possibilities. I read it in some ancient Terran writer, a single phrase I can’t forget: Lead us into temptation. That’s part of what archaeology has become for me: a window on life–life more abundant–though so many see it as immersion in death–my parents, for example, who go along with me but are still Eosian in their basic values, living in a world that’s no more real, now, than the one I’m seeking underground.
Oddly enough–since it’s hardly scientific–I also carry within me the far-off hope that some day I may even learn the first Eosians’ former name, the word they used to describe themselves, that vital Us. It just seems important somehow.
The colonization of Eos was a new beginning for Terran humanity–and now we’re beginning again. We won’t waste this second chance. Now we have this weight to bear, this shadow, this ancient sunlight to imagine, this enormous text to read. Before the Change, Eos had no “past”; I was on Terra, at the university, when I first heard the word used that way: a woman with a past. Eosians just didn’t think like that. The Ceremony today, as fascinating as it was to all Eosians, wasn’t exactly festive. It was almost like a wedding: lots of excitement and joy, but then that solemn moment when they pledge their lives to each other forever, and everyone’s thinking, Sure–but that’s a mighty long haul.
Now that the ground beneath us is peopled, is richer and darker than we’d ever imagined, there’s a new seriousness in our lives, a sense of sadness as well as of distant companionship, a strange beckoning from our future–but out of our past.
And that makes me deeply happy, though I’m still not completely sure why.
END